Calculating compassion: Humanity and relief in war, Britain 1870–1914

By Rebecca Gill

Calculating compassion examines the origins of British relief work in late-nineteenth-century wars on the continent and the fringes of Empire. Commencing with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, it follows distinguished surgeons and ‘lady amateurs’ as they distributed aid to wounded soldiers and distressed civilians, often in the face of considerable suspicion. Dispensing with the notion of shared ‘humanitarian’ ideals, it examines the complex, and sometimes controversial, origins of organised relief, and illuminates the emergence of practices and protocols still recognisable in the delivery of overseas aid. This book is intended for students, academics and relief practitioners interested in the historical concerns of first generation relief agencies such as the British Red Cross Society and the Save the Children Fund, and their legacies today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526110640

Rebecca Gill

Rebecca Gill is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Huddersfield

Book preview

Calculating compassion

This series offers a new interdisciplinary reflection on one of the most important and yet understudied areas in history, politics and cultural practices: humanitarian aid and its responses to crises and conflicts. The series seeks to define afresh the boundaries and methodologies applied to the study of humanitarian relief and so-called ‘humanitarian events’. The series includes monographs and carefully selected thematic edited collections which will cross disciplinary boundaries and bring fresh perspectives to the historical, political and cultural understanding of the rationale and impact of humanitarian relief work.

Calculating compassion

Humanity and relief in war, Britain 1870–1914

Rebecca Gill

Manchester University Press

Manchester and New York

distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Rebecca Gill 2013

The right of Rebecca Gill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK

and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Distributed in the United States exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,

NY 10010, USA

Distributed in Canada exclusively by

UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall,

Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7810 1 hardback

First published 2013

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10.5/12.5pt Arno Pro

by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: calculating compassion in war

Part I    A new vocation: British relief in war – France, 1870–71

1    The origins of British relief in war

2    Accounting for compassion: British relief in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870–71

Part II    Knowledge of suffering and the politics of relief: the Balkans, 1876–78

3    New humanitarian politics: ‘victim’ nations and the brotherhood of humanity

4    Neutrality and the politics of aid in insurgency: British relief to the Balkans, 1876–78

Part III    Boundaries of compassion: humanity and relief in British wars, c.1884–1914

5    Scientific humanitarianism and British ‘tyranny’ in South Africa

6    The rational application of compassion? Relief, reconstruction and disputes over civilian suffering in the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902

7    Neutrality, proficiency and the feminisation of aid: from the ‘scramble for Africa’ to the Great War

Conclusion: humanity and relief in war and peace

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1    Watercolour painting by Robert Thomas Landells depicting Colonel Robert Loyd Lindsay, chairman of the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War and Mr Whittle, both on foot, at Versailles. Courtesy of the British Red Cross Museum and Archives.

2    Photograph of orphans in the asylum of the Turkish Compassionate Fund at Filibe. © The British Library Board, The Turkish Compassionate Fund: An account of its origin, working and results (8028.f.19).

3    First World War fundraising poster designed by Alonso Earl Foringer for the American Red Cross and distributed in Britain in 1918. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

4    First page of the Balkan Committee’s pamphlet depicting murdered Macedonian peasants. © The British Library Board, Victoria de Bunsen and Noel Edward Buxton, Macedonian Massacres: Photos from Macedonia (8027.a.29).

Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to thank individuals and organisations for their generous assistance in the research and writing of this book. This book is based on a PhD thesis submitted to the University of Manchester, and I first wish to acknowledge the unflagging support, enthusiasm and insights of my PhD supervisor, Bertrand Taithe, without whom this project would never have got off the ground. Thanks are owed also to Peter Gatrell and John Horne, my two examiners, for their careful reading and comments.

Since starting work at the University of Huddersfield, I have been fortunate to benefit from a period of research leave. I would like to thank my colleagues in the History Department for making this possible and for their consistent support while I was writing this book.

Over the years, I have profited from the insight and erudition of Jo Laycock, Helen Dampier and Emily Baughan and I would like to express my gratitude for their willingness to share their research and knowledge with me. I would also like to thank David Taylor, Brian Walker and Stéphanie Prévost for taking the trouble to read drafts of this book.

Every attempt has been made to contact holders of copyright for the images and quotations from private papers that I have reproduced. For reproductions of illustrations and permission to reproduce photographs, acknowledgements are due to the British Library, the Library of Congress and the British Red Cross Museum and Archives. I wish to thank archivists at a number of institutions for making their collections available to me. These include the Wellcome Library (and the RAMC for making the Longmore papers publicly available); the London School of Economics library; the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester; the Bodleian Library (and the National Trust for making the Disraeli papers available for consultation); the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; the Document and Sound Section at the Imperial War Museum; The National Archives; the British Red Cross Museum and Archives; and the Library of the Society of Friends, London. John Spencer of Bankfield Museum in Halifax was kind enough to furnish me with historical details of British Army uniforms.

Finally, a big thank you is owed to my husband, Andrew, whose love and encouragement made the writing of this book possible.

Abbreviations

BLPES    British Library of Political and Economic Science

BRCS    British Red Cross Society

CBRCC    Central British Red Cross Committee

COS    Charity Organisation Society

FWVRF    Friends War Victims’ Relief Fund

ICRC    International Committee of the Red Cross

IWM    Imperial War Museum

JRL    John Rylands Library, University of Manchester

LSF    Library of the Society of Friends

NAS    British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War

RAMC    Royal Army Medical Corps

SACC    South African Conciliation Committee

SCF    Save the Children Fund

TNA    The National Archives

VAD    Voluntary Aid Detachment

Introduction: calculating compassion in war

‘Pity and sympathy would have inclined me to carry liberality to its utmost limits, but I endeavoured to keep my heart in subjection to my head.’1 With these words, Sir John Furley, founder member of the St John Ambulance Association and long-time champion of battlefield philanthropy, looked back on an eventful career. At the point of writing, he had undertaken voluntary action on behalf of wounded soldiers in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and the South African War of 1899–1902. Photographs from the time show him resplendent in the ornamental uniform of the Order of St John, plumed helmet and an array of knightly paraphernalia suggesting venerable traditions and exalted lineage. In reality, the present incumbents of St John’s Gate in Clerkenwell were able to date their origins back no further than the 1850s. Critics did not spare their jibes at this parvenu ‘claptrap and mutual decoration crowd’.2 Yet, for all that they were beset by mockery, pecuniary difficulties and rivalry, the Order of St John’s attempt to revive a tradition of battlefield chivalry is an important strand in the history of modern relief work in Britain. It is with unravelling these rather tangled origins that this book is concerned.

Furley’s attempt to subject heart to head resounded in many accounts of relief work in this period. Not all of these arose from the experience of organising assistance to wounded combatants. Others recounted missions to aid civilian populations caught perilously in the grip of war. Aid to the suffering in war was hardly new, of course, but an impulse to rationalise and organise was. Furley and his colleagues were only too happy to remind the public of the Hospitaller work carried out by the medieval Knights of St John during the crusades to the Holy Land. More recent examples included Florence Nightingale’s famous mission to ameliorate conditions in British army hospitals during the Crimean War. The Quakers, meanwhile, had been quietly providing assistance to non-combatants since the early 1800s. But by the late nineteenth century, a new generation of relief funds had arisen, singularly protesting their organisational proficiency, neutrality and impartiality, and trenchantly eschewing the partisanship and evangelism of earlier endeavours.

Accompanying Furley and his associates to the battlefields were a number of rival societies for the relief of war-time suffering. In theatres of war in nineteenth-century Europe – France, the Balkans – and in Britain’s wars of empire – the Sudan, South Africa – enterprising men and women opened soup kitchens, carried stretchers, nursed the wounded and delivered food and clothing to the destitute. These years saw the now ubiquitous Red Cross emblem first make its appearance on the battlefield. Emblazoned on armbands and ambulance wagons, it symbolised the neutral status that medical staff and their patients were granted by the 1864 Geneva Convention. As will be seen, not all of those delivering aid were convinced that the flourishing Red Cross movement represented an unqualified good, or were agreed as to its purpose. At home, meanwhile, impromptu warehouses overflowed with a miscellany of donations. When the Franco-Prussian War flared across the Channel, society ladies squeezed their way through stacks of packing cases to oversee the sorting and shipping of Bovril and pyjamas, Benger’s invalid food, blankets, soda water and bandages. These scenes were replicated with each new conflict. Volunteers of both sexes abounded, and matériel was distributed in unprecedented quantities; some of this provided welcome comfort, on occasion it proved essential to life.

Whether in warehouses at home or on foreign battlefields, volunteers did not always work in harmony, but many demonstrated great sense of purpose, and, on occasion, bravery. Some lost their lives, killed in shell attacks on hospitals or dying of typhus among crowded refugee encampments. Many more relished the escapades, camaraderie and even privations of war. We should not imagine that all were competent or compelled primarily by a sense of compassion: opportunities for adventure, pay and professional experience all proved a draw. Eminent surgeons rubbed shoulders with those qualified by little more than a few hasty days’ observation in a local hospital. Some were complete novices. Others were fresh from medical school, energetic and enthusiastic, but, as the most candid admitted, cavalier in their absolute power over the sick and wounded, and dangerously ill-equipped for battlefield surgery. Still others left businesses and professional occupations behind. Derision and suspicion abounded, of amateurism, profiteering, theft from cadavers and a ghoulish voyeurism; of civilising war, but in doing so, making it palatable. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, Josephine Butler, sceptical of all things military, derided the ‘graceful charity’ involved in ‘making bandages’.3 In Blackwood’s Magazine another observer complained of ‘Jew pedlars, camp-sutlers, neutral vendors of bad cigars and worse liquor … seen at Sedan wearing the Red Cross’.4 Some of this criticism was justified.

In now largely unread tales of ambulance adventures and life amidst huddled refugee populations, a sidelight is thrown on the backwash of war.5 In their pages, the squalor and misery of impromptu camps and temporary hospitals are gleaned, but so too are flashes of hope and idealism. The honing of relief workers’ professional skill is documented and, just as important, an ability to extemporise in the face of war-time disorder. We learn of people and experiences not usually dwelt upon in standard military histories: of daring dashes across snow-topped Balkan mountains to reach the injured; of ‘lady amateurs’ accused of volunteering their services in search of hospital passions; and of the innovativeness of the British Red Cross personnel who accompanied Wolseley on his Nile expedition to rescue Gordon. The landscape of war opens out to include soldiers rendered hors de combat by their injuries and evacuated to the remnants of buildings or, if lucky, a well-ordered Red Cross hospital. We catch sight of those caught in devastating conflict and interned against their will in civilian camps, and of those despairing of whether to flee their homes or struggle for subsistence in ruined villages.

Such tales illuminate the diverse inspiration, impressive innovation and uneven efficacy of those pioneering individuals who rushed to offer some form of amelioration. That they did so amidst chaos, broken communications and lost supplies is testament both to their endurance and the ad hoc nature of early relief efforts. Here in the backwash they joined journalists, tourists, consular officials, arms dealers and medical salesmen in the jostling peripatetic communities unique to war and disaster. Frequently, their motivation for aiding the wounded and vulnerable was met with suspicion by a press that was by turns prurient and censorious. But for being used to thinking of relief workers as modern-day saints, we ought not to be surprised that their arbitrary interventions were not always welcome or thought benevolent. Indeed, the question of motivation remains an apt one. There is too ready a willingness to collapse relief agencies’ present-day concerns and dilemmas into the aspirations of this pioneering generation. Or to assume that aid organisations are simply timeless compassion given administrative form. Instead, ideals and aspirations varied, and they repay historical scrutiny. The novel refrain of neutrality and impartiality may have been heard over and again among late nineteenth-century relief workers, but it would be a mistake to assume that this arose from a common imperative or a shared response to human suffering. Many a time, instances of suffering that prompted Sir John Furley and his knights-errant to pity left others cold.

At the core of this book there rests an inquiry: why, at this historical juncture, did particular instances of war-time suffering move Furley and certain other contemporaries to action? Furley was far from unique in extolling the need to balance heart with head, pity with proficiency. How and why this was attempted also requires consideration. Doing so brings into focus the tentative emergence of relief work as a new vocational field. Here arose notions of scientific impartiality, routine ‘emergency’ practices and a plethora of new war-time roles. These gave shape to a field of endeavour still recognisable today. Not all war-time suffering occasioned such a response, however. Nineteenth-century relief workers did not assume a mandate to respond to all suffering in all wars. A rush of pity may have been felt for the Christian in the war-torn Balkans, but not for his Jewish or Muslim neighbour; a sympathetic outcry may be heard over the plight of Boers in concentration camps, but a segregation of concern may render silent the suffering of black inmates. All were not equal in the brotherhood of humanity. This begs the question, still pertinent today, of how the boundaries of compassion operated. The unashamedly selective nature of nineteenth-century relief work offers one crucial difference from the universal proclamations of modern-day aid agencies, but it has bestowed some troubling legacies and habits of mind, nonetheless.

Relief in war: mapping ‘the field’

Some of the organisations that feature in this book are familiar: the St John Ambulance Association, the Save the Children Fund (SCF), the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) and the various committees of the Religious Society of Friends are with us today. Others lasting the duration of a single conflict are now more or less forgotten. With their foundation, relief work emerged as a discernible enterprise of modern war, the legacies of which are complicated and occasionally controversial. Though to be found proffering solidarity with the vulnerable or victimised in conflicts of unprecedented scale and ferocity, they were not simply bystanders at the birth of ‘total’ war; instead, they were integral to the medico-military infrastructure that made wars of attrition between large conscript and volunteer armies possible and palatable. They were also at the forefront of the relief, rehabilitation and resettlement of populations displaced or interned in wars which increasingly targeted civilian populations. For some, such as the British Red Cross, this assistance was in deliberate service to a military imperative: there was both virtue and advantage to be had in greater hospital efficiency and well-run internment camps. For others, including Quakers and radicals of all hues, relief in war was conceived as a protest at a militarised state and society and as constructive work towards international peace and freedom (though this did not preclude their endeavours from serving military imperatives, however unintentional). The emergence of organised relief work intersected with attempts at the rationalisation of philanthropy and social investigation at home, with anxieties over military capacity and with the rise of a crusading ‘new’ journalism. It also contributed to wide-ranging political transformations. Among other things, this saw ‘England’s Mission’ abroad debated, the War Office assert itself over an entrenched military elite and the entitlements of participatory citizenship pressed with ever greater vigour.

This book starts with the diverse motivations of this pioneering generation of relief workers in mind, rather than by assuming any shared humanitarian ideal. Here, attentiveness to the language in which relief workers couched their own sense of purpose is revealing. For the word ‘humanitarian’, so frequently coupled with relief work today, was largely avoided, its usage connoting a crankish disposition and a tendency to merciless inflexibility. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, in the nineteenth century the term was ‘nearly always contemptuous, connoting one who goes to excess in their humane principles’.6 Thus, it could be said with admiration that the Prussians, ‘confident in the support of their superiors’, knew

. . . nothing of the pusillanimous dread of the Press and fear of responsibility asserted to be traditional in the English Army; they are humane not humanitarian. The question with them is not, ‘Can a man be removed with safety?’ but, ‘Will his removal give him a better chance of recovery than his remaining?’ If so, though he may suffer seriously in transit, the suffering must be borne.7

The earliest use of the term to denote a set of vocational practices – that is, of the emergency relief of the wounded that we specifically associate with ‘humanitarian aid’ today – was during the Great War. In 1914 Sir James Cantlie, Harley Street doctor and prominent promoter of the Red Cross, founded the College of Ambulance and Humanitarian Corps in London, giving classes in first aid, home nursing, hospital remedies and hygiene.8 Prior to this, many in the Red Cross movement in Britain referred simply to the ‘aid and assistance’ they offered to belligerent armies in the field. In doing so, they captured the subsidiary role that they envisaged for themselves vis-à-vis the regular army medical service. Quakers of this period, meanwhile, refused aid to soldiers but concentrated with renewed theological conviction on non-combatant relief. They tended to render their work a form of ‘loving service’.9 Even today, many Quakers reject the term ‘humanitarian’ for failing to capture the spiritual import that they attach to relief. But this period did include one defiantly positive appropriation of the term. Intersecting circles of radicals – Positivists, socialists and New Liberals – concerned with the wellspring of ethical acts in an age when a Christian God was a less ready spur to action invested the term with new scientific import.10 Foremost among these were members of the Humanitarian League (founded 1891), such as Edward Carpenter, Frederic Harrison and Ramsay MacDonald. ‘Humanitarianism’ offered the possibility of a technocratic altruism based upon objectively adduced laws of moral action. It would be from these circles that one prominent strand of crusading relief work would emerge in this period, concerned with raising the public’s moral consciousness and with ‘rational’ alleviation of suffering. But again, it would be a mistake to imagine that this ‘humanitarian’ work was the direct antecedent of present-day humanitarian relief, just as it would be erroneous to assume that it denoted universality of provision or was grounded in an understanding of individual human rights.11 Far from it.

For many in this period, whether aiding soldiers or feeding civilians, the claims of humanity were deemed concomitant with patriotic loyalty and the enlightened but central role of the state. Full participation in humanity depended upon one’s place in the scale of civilisation, fostered and promoted by a suitably progressive polity, rather than any inalienable human rights. By the same token, relief agencies tended to prioritise their European ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, busying themselves with those considered the most susceptible to their civilising example and calling upon government to intervene on their behalf. Thus, though early relief workers undertook novel transnational interventions, transferring resources and expertise across national borders and drawing attention to distant suffering, it would be far from accurate to assume that all adhered to ‘internationalism’ as carrying moral value, wished to be thought of as ‘humanitarians’ or considered that the claims of ‘humanity’ transcended the imperial or nation state.

This, then, is a complex field of endeavour, and one irreducible to a single ideal. ‘Field’ is used here not in the purloined anthropological sense that aid workers attach to ‘going into the field’ today, with its suggestion of an extant site of professional endeavour and its obliteration of the processes of identification and interaction, but in a meaning of the term inspired by another borrowing, this time from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s main preoccupation was the arena of artistic and literary production, but his notion of a vocational ‘field’ works equally well in other cases – in this instance, the coming into being of a field of organised relief work during the late nineteenth century. Particularly instructive is Bourdieu’s insistence on a model that combines recognition of individual agency, innovation and virtue with an acknowledgement of the importance of social relations. He did not assume that vocational behaviour is purely autonomous, but nor did he assume that social structures simply determine behaviour in any mechanistic sense.12 Rather, he emphasised habitus – an individual’s habits of mind or dispositions, which, though apparently intuitive, are shaped by the social relations, institutional practices and distinguishing customs that define their professional field. Habitus both organises perceptions and influences future practice. As applied here, this theory of professional practice encompasses the processes of selection and models of delivery adopted in encounters with suffering strangers. But it also extends to domestic administrative arrangements and fund-raising and recruitment drives to encompass the span of how suffering was expressed, compassion represented and relief ministered.

Bourdieu situated the vocational field of endeavour within external relations of political and social power. He also analysed internal competition over the meaning and merit ascribed to individual or institutional actions (in this case the criticism that flew between rival relief organisations and animated the pages of the press). Crucially, he viewed the nature of such competition and critique as circumscribed, as self-perpetuating and as providing an important legitimating function for the field as a whole. To understand the field of relief, it therefore becomes necessary not only to consider the importance of competition and rivalry, but to look also for the philanthropic conventions and cultural assumptions – or habits of mind – that were so commonplace as to appear universal. This book highlights how, in the contest over how authentic knowledge of suffering was adduced and compassion best calculated, legitimacy was – and continues to be – bestowed on the value of relief work in principle. Rather than adjudicate between competing ethical positions, it investigates the historical context that made the very existence of these practices – and this ethical debate – possible.

In this period, the field of relief work was liable to be ad hoc in its interventions, its committees governed by small, often dynastic, and usually rivalrous, affiliations, and a traditionally gendered division of labour. Very quickly, like many of those running charitable organisations in this era, these committees came to value efficiency, and the standardisation of care, personnel and technique. But for individual volunteers, traditional notions of charitable service and intuitive acts of heartfelt compassion remained central to the value that they placed on their work, and featured no less prominently in fund-raising campaigns. It is not surprising that the most perspicacious relief workers felt acutely the difficulty of balancing heart and head, pity and routine, for these early volunteers were exporting the philanthropic conventions – and conflicts – of their age. Steeped in the Victorian culture of altruism and welfare reform, they were active at a moment when concerted efforts were being made to systematically investigate poverty and rationalise the provision of relief, and when calls for greater statutory intervention were beginning to be heard with greater frequency. Many advocates of war-time relief had direct experience of social intervention and inquiry amongst the metropolitan poor. Here, as abroad, they grappled with the appropriate response to suffering and with the duty of voluntary action. They also experienced some of the pleasures and rewards that came with venturing into the lives of the poor, and the peculiar glamour that attached itself to slumming and self-imposed privation found an echo in the escapades of war relief. New vistas for exploration and adventure came into view and offered the possibility for self-assertion and an antidote to the boredom of middle-class women’s lives.13

This was the era in which the strictures of independence and ‘self-help’ and fears of the pauperising effects of unfettered and ill-coordinated charity motivated the Charity Organisation Society (COS) to consolidate domestic relief provision. A similar trend is observable in overseas relief. The necessity of accurate investigation was advocated; surveys and interviews were instigated. Eglantyne Jebb, founder member of the SCF, and herself a COS worker, was to bemoan the inefficiencies of foreign relief funds, and decry the lack of ‘self help’ among war victims. Kate Courtney, also an SCF founder member, had trained with the COS and had assisted Samuel Barnett in his settlement work in East London. Here she developed contacts and experience which would inform her campaigning work in the South African and First World wars. Like many, these women embodied the on-going tension between ‘empathetic and scientific’ approaches to human need.14

Unlike domestic hardship, which, however ‘foreign’ to middle-class observers, was also proximate, overseas relief work took place in difficult-to-reach and little-known areas. Part of this book involves consideration of how knowledge of this distant suffering arose. Here, the rise of investigative journalism was as crucial to the field of foreign relief as it was to dramatic exposés of exploitation and suffering at home. Newspapers of the period took to hiring foreign correspondents and utilising the new electric telegraph to provide on-the-spot reports. But pity and the impetus to ameliorative action were not simply a response to the immediacy of graphic reportage: the ties between the emerging fields of relief work and ‘new’ journalism were far closer and more knotted, as were the individual relationships between aid workers and their contacts in the press. Relief workers relied on journalists for intelligence and the setting of priorities when their own lines of communication were weak. But the reverse was true, and newspapers frequently followed where relief workers led. Press interest lent the new aid organisations valuable publicity, and relief agents’ frequent ‘letters to the editor’ offered a means to public accountability. But such publicity had its drawbacks: relief work had become a favourite topic in newspapers eager for eye-witness accounts of war, but equivocation existed over the propriety of these new ventures. Were relief agents as rigorously accountable as they claimed, or, journalists asked, as neutral? Intimate accounts of suffering and its ministration were relished, but the same newspaper might well air suspicions of partiality and incompetence. And there was a fine line between publicity for a cause and criticism of existing provision. Advocating aid to British soldiers risked jealousy and suspicion among the military medical services – precisely those with whom co-operation was essential. In such cases, access might well be compromised. But was silence preferable? Diplomacy, tact and good relations with the press were thus crucial: and the role and etiquette of the relief worker took shape in response. Sometimes the journalist and the relief worker were one and the same person. The Daily Telegraph’s reporter during the 1870–71 siege of Paris also allocated its relief fund, and this was by no means the only example. Graphic reportage sustained the granting of relief; but the reverse was also true.

Until after the Great War, the career relief worker was an exception. As well as journalism and charity work, overseas relief workers had a variety of peace-time occupations, as missionaries, politicians and scholars, as members of the military, or on the staff of teaching hospitals. This meant that they could mobilise friends and contacts in a number of influential circles. It also meant, of course, that the direction and form of relief owed much to the ebb and flow of wider political, professional and intellectual currents. Relief workers did not simply respond to these preoccupations: they contributed to the shaping of perceptions and knowledge, especially concerning appropriate involvement in foreign affairs. One key area of debate was the implication of emergent European nationalism. Was it a threat to the Continental balance of power, or did it offer the promise of self-determination and a new order of consensual and peaceful international relations? Ought Britain to intervene, and if so what was to be the nature of this intervention – and how might proffering relief assist in these contending processes of stabilisation and liberation? Equally animating was the expansion of empire, the fulfilment, it seemed, of Disraelian imperialism, yet dominated by contending visions of liberalism and the rise of colonial nationalism. While Red Cross personnel accompanied the British army in its imperial wars, other relief organisations, reaching out to their suffering ‘sisters’ in the colonies, challenged the nature of these imperial connections. And what was the appropriate response to wars that were now increasingly national or ‘total’? New medical challenges were posed by rapid-fire weaponry, Krupp steel and other technological innovations, while antisepsis, sprung-wheeled stretchers and hospital trains contributed both to the capacities and to the demands experienced by voluntary organisations. Did relief workers form part of the first line of national defence – or was their purpose to soften international rivalries and remedy militarism at home?

Relief workers not only helped to shape the debate on foreign policy interventions, but also helped to ensure that these were held up as test cases of the morality of the political class. The politics of humanity and relief therefore were complex: spanning the implications for the intended recipients of aid, on the one hand, and the political aspirations of those at home, on the other. In many cases, relief workers provided the direct and ‘impartial’ knowledge of suffering which a new generation of tenacious journalists (W. T. Stead at the Northern Echo, in particular) used to stir moral agitation and hold politicians to account. Stead and his ilk demanded that the people’s moral interests be represented; meanwhile, sympathetically minded statesmen made attempts to capture the moral imagination and aspirations of a growing electorate – and used relief workers’ testimony to lend authority to political pronouncements. Gladstone, famously, attempted to galvanise Liberal supporters over the treatment of distant Bulgarians and blessed relief agents then at work in the Balkans. Attendance at a protest meeting, subscription to a relief fund, bandage rolling or volunteer nursing, all could be seen as a personal and intuitive response to the suffering of others. But they also constituted participation in new moral communities and nourished emerging political identities that were all the more powerful because they rested on a sense of duty, ‘higher ideals’ and a feeling of solidarity. In this way, voluntary aid work could endorse claims of moral and participatory citizenship premised on public service to one’s country, an appeal which held particular attraction for the politically marginal or unenfranchised – female suffragists, especially.

This was true both of those such as the Order of St John, which advocated voluntary relief work with the British army as a patriotic duty, and those of ‘progressive’ views who advocated aid as a gesture of public-spirited solidarity with the oppressed. Of the latter, the Religious Society of Friends was prominent. For many Quakers relief work was an expression of theological commitment. Whether at home or abroad, they participated in many of the relief committees and instances of practical aid work under discussion. In tracing both their compulsion to do so and their distinctive methods of distribution and accountability it is possible to observe the importance of relief work to how Quakers viewed themselves in this period, and also that the legacy of their approaches and practices has endured to the present. The challenges of grappling with the demands of modern war, of implementing new approaches to poverty and of reckoning with the upheaval of a ‘Quaker Renaissance’ in theology all underpinned Quaker relief in this period. For Quakers, as for others in the late nineteenth century, relief work became an arena in which wider ideas and identities were forged and contested.

Moral progress or condemned to repeat?

In recent years, much has